Scenario 1

Mr Padma is a lawyer at the law firm XYZ and Associates. His firm has taken on a Malaysian client with a civil case in Switzerland. During the discovery process, Mr. Padma realises that all the discovery documents are in French. There are over 1000 pages of documents, consisting mainly of financial documents and contracts. He was not sure if he would need to use all the documents but he needed to understand them before he could choose the relevant documents for his case. Once he has chosen the relevant documents, they would need to be certified for use in court. Mr. Padma contacted a translation agency who quoted him RM80,000 for human translation services and an additional RM30 per page for certification. Assuming that he needed to certify 500 pages, that would bring his total cost to RM95,000 for translation services alone and it would take about 3 weeks to translate, followed by another 1 week to certify, a total of 4 weeks

Mr. Padma contacted us, and after discussing the timeframe, criteria and budget, we suggested that he use machine translation to translate the documents so that he could read them and roughly understand them, after he had chosen the relevant documents, we would use a human translator to edit the documents that needed to be certified. We quoted Mr. Padma RM5,000 for the MT work and assuming he needed the same number of pages certified (500), another RM25,000 for the editing. Adding the certification cost in, it brought the total payable to RM45,000 for the translation services. We needed 2 days for the MT work, another 1 week for the editing and 1 week for the certification process, a total of 2.5 weeks. This represents a cost and time savings of roughly 50% compared to the human translation and a substantial savings for Mr. Padma and his client.